CIBC Collaboration

Collaboration and service are integral to the success of our Center. The collaborations we foster have the potential to lead to Driving Biomedical Projects which, in turn, influence the TR&D research. The evidence for successful collaborations is seen in the Centers publication numbers and cited software. These collaborations would not be possible if we did not rely heavily on our service infrastructure to provide a mechanism for reaching out to a broad community of users. While our practice has proved effective, this process is challenging due to the remote location of many of our users, the limited electronic interactions, and the cross cutting research areas our collaborators come from.

To address these challenges, we have developed a systematic series of stages we can use to identify potential collaborators as well as make use of our Driving Biomedical Project Research Clusters to attract collaborators. First, we actively identify motivated users through our mailing lists, bug fix requests, contact request forms, and workshop and training events. Through those interactions, we can quickly identify the type of service a user might need. These types of services can be a simple as identifying a tutorial or pointing at an example dataset for a particular software program, or as involved as setting up multiple one-on-one meetings to address a specialized need. Through these interactions we build our collaborative base and learn more about the requirements of the research community. The Center can then choose to address these needs as new features in our software. In addition to identifying individual research needs, we envision our research clusters as a way of reaching out to a broader community of researchers. The clusters translate problems for a small community into a larger area of interest, which in turn fosters more collaboration. We see these combined efforts of reaching out to users and researchers through service, while also exploiting the Research Clusters, as an advertising mechanism for attracting new collaborations.

The Collaboration Pipeline

Current CIBC Collaborators

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Past CIBC Collaborators

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Biomedical Research Cluster 1: Microscopy and Small Scale Imaging Collaborators